Small things take over. As he's going to bed, he makes sure the bag is positioned correctly so that it doesn't pull away from his stomach and cause trauma or infection. A blocked catheter is another concern. The bladder could dangerously swell. There is no sensation, so he wouldn't know.

You learn to be alert with a C4 neck injury. Life changes, and Mark Governey tries to adjust. He has to. For instance, he has discovered that you can do almost anything on the computer without having to touch it. Recently, while sending an email to an uncle in Sri Lanka, telling him about the Lansdowne match against Terenure in the All Ireland League, he came across something else.

"I was saying `Blah, blah, blah' to the computer and said `Full stop'. Then I said to myself `Now, what the f**k will I say next'. Up on the screen comes `Now what the f**k will I say next'." You learn all the time.

Mark doesn't remember what happened when he was playing full back for Lansdowne against Belvedere just over a year ago, but others who witnessed the accident will not forget.

"I believe that their full back came in blind. I didn't see him until the last moment and went into tackle. I took the full force of him and was thrown back into one of my own players," he says.

Seldom does such an innocent act have such catastrophic consequences. Such tackles happen every week in rugby and the players get up and walk away. It is part of the game, the enjoyment, the thrill. Being hit and hitting. Leaving a pitch tired and fulfilled. Mark didn't get up. When he came around the next day his family had assembled around his bed in the intensive care unit of the Mater Hospital.

"I don't remember getting up that morning. I don't remember anything of the day. I'd stopped breathing, but luckily there was a nurse on the sideline. She kept doing CPR on me . . . I think she kept it up for half an hour. How do you thank someone like that enough? She just kept going and kept going. Evelyn Quinn . . . she kept me alive.

"Even though my lips and my face had turned blue she kept at it until the ambulance arrived. The Lansdowne under-20s had a match on the pitch beside us and she was kind of their team medic and she just happened to be there. I think now at any match up in Kilgobbin there is an ambulance."

He was on a ventilator for six months, and spent a year in the National Rehabilitation Centre in Dublin. Now Mark faces a new world paralysed from the neck down.

In the face of it he is ferociously stoic, and his determined acceptance of that one defining moment in his life is humbling.

"Even to this day no one has told me that I will never walk again. I thought at the beginning that I was going out to the rehabilitation hospital to be fixed and eventually I'd walk. As months went past I began to realise that I was complete - my spinal chord was completely severed. "You just learn yourself. It's a realisation. No one has said you won't walk again. It is something you come to terms with. There has been no improvement at all since the day I arrived here."

Mark is not alone in rugby. On average there are one or two such injuries every year in Ireland, most of them young men. Last year Donal O'Flynn and Danny Noonan suffered similar damage.

None was adequately insured, something which will have significant consequences for their quality of life. Other than those professionals who can afford enormous premiums, most players in Ireland are under-insured in the event of a devastating spine injury.

"There is a basic compulsory insurance scheme for everyone who plays the game," says IRFU chief executive Philip Browne. "The standard club scheme costs £882 per team. But we would also encourage clubs very strongly to top it up. We'd be unhappy about the level of topping up in clubs."

The basic insurance scheme through Royal and SunAlliance covers players to a maximum of £500,000. That figure comes into play only in the case of an injury which results in permanent and total disability. The IRFU's Compulsory Personal Accident Scheme for 1999-2000 grimly lists the price of eyes, limbs and the loss of life itself. Death - £400,000; loss of two limbs and or the loss of both eyes or one limb and one eye - £400,000; loss of one limb or the loss of one eye - £200,000; permanent total disability - £500,000.

But £500,000 is not close to enough money to comfortably care for a relatively young family member for the rest of his or her life. The Governeys had never considered that £500,000 would go such a small way.

As the injured jockey, Shane Broderick, and many others have discovered, figures of between £2 million and £3 million are offered as more realistic costs for the permanently disabled. "When I look at Mark's needs for the rest of his life, £500,000 is totally inadequate to cover it all," says his mother, Elizabeth.

There are currently 20 former rugby players on the data base of the Spinal Injuries Association, which is based in the National Rehabilitation Centre in Dublin. All spinal injuries in the Republic eventually arrive there. The insurance cover explicitly states that there is no legal obligation on the IRFU to provide cover, but that the premiums charged relate directly to the number of claims. The IRFU, in turn, charge the clubs on the basis of the number of teams per club. The onus, the insurers say, rests with the player. How many players know that? How many realise that on average two of their colleagues will be paralysed each year? How many understand that in the event of such tragedies their needs will not be covered?

"There are only two sports in Ireland with spinal injuries that high, rugby and equestrian," says Dr Paddy Murray of the spinal injuries unit. "There is nothing more tragic. There are more injuries now in the tackle and ruck, fewer in the front row from collapsing scrums. The tackle is basically uncontrolled and that's where the problems occur."

Is the frequency too high? "I played rugby. My kids played rugby. I sent them to a rugby playing school and never inhibited them. Two of them are doctors," he answers.

The IRFU have run seminars for coaches to try to prevent and to deal with neck injuries, and they have been well attended. When it happens, no one in the sport is left untouched.

"There was only one stage - and I remember it clearly because it was around Easter - when I broke down," says Mark. "My sister was there. I just thought, I'll never have a life. I used to play golf, tennis, everything. I just thought, what can I do? I can't do anything anymore.

"I was really upset, but since then I just . . . I get down, but I get on with it. I don't regret playing rugby because . . . because I used to love it."

Mark Governey Appeal Fund. AIB, 12 St Stephen's Green. Account Number: 17666019. Sort Code: 93-11-52.